For various reasons, I am currently in the process or purging my childhood collections. Much must go. Clay ashtrays. High school agendas. Audio tapes.
Not actually my dog, but not unlike my dog. From Jen Maruska Design.
But surely not the stuffies? Not the well-loved ones, with their bald patches and button eyes, all smelling vaguely of saliva and dust? They have to stay.
The older a thing is, the harder it is to lose.
Stuff from the 90s is easier to part with. The Soul Asylum cassette I bought when I was 13 because I heard some "cool" girls discussing the song "The Sun Maid" -- this can go. Also easy to leave behind is the double cassette version of Smashing Pumpkin's mid-90s epic Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. I can hold the memory of listening to "Bullet With Butterfly Wings" over and over again in my closet in the dark, rewinding obsessively between plays without a physical reminder.
In my adult life, I've become the sort of person who lets thing go easily. Stuff is not so important anymore. Relationships that aren't working are easy to abandon. I am quick to delete people from Facebook if they bore or annoy me. I am better at leaving things behind. I would recommend this course to anyone. The past is important, but not primarily important. Some things are important, but not all things.
But what this purge has shown me is what a magpie I used to be. Once upon a time, I kept everything. It all seemed so necessary. And that hoarding tendency seeped into my relationships and my work. I couldn't let go. I was afraid of loss.
But what this purge has shown me is what a magpie I used to be. Once upon a time, I kept everything. It all seemed so necessary. And that hoarding tendency seeped into my relationships and my work. I couldn't let go. I was afraid of loss.
I suppose I still am, to some extent. But I try to keep that tendency from boxing me into spaces and places that aren't much good.
Some talismans will stay: My great grandmother's pink marble egg; my collection of 1967 centennial pennies (an early indication of my love of birds); my wedding ring, which was my grandmother's and her mother's before her, my bronze cross, the strange little velvet sombrero Patty brought me from Mexico when we were six.
Some talismans will stay: My great grandmother's pink marble egg; my collection of 1967 centennial pennies (an early indication of my love of birds); my wedding ring, which was my grandmother's and her mother's before her, my bronze cross, the strange little velvet sombrero Patty brought me from Mexico when we were six.
These things must stay, not because they're valuable, not because they're especially important, but because they make me happy. If you use that benchmark -- does it make you happy? -- it's easy to know what to keep.
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